A teen survives tragedy

This new offering from adult novelist Alice Hoffman is a haunting, beautiful post-9/11 fairy tale for our time. When Green's parents and little sister, Aurora, go to the city for the day, Green stays home to work in the garden. But disaster strikes the city. The ground shakes, people jump from buildings, the whoosh of fire can be heard across the river, and ashes sweep across the water in...

Making believe

In The River King, ghosts appear in photographs and people are knocked out by an overwhelming smell of roses "though the weather was dismal and no flowers bloomed." This isn't the real world, it's the world of Alice Hoffman, whose 13 novels sparkle with enchantment."There are people who write fiction to come to terms with their...

Scintillating stories from Alice Hoffman

First the settlers called the Massachusetts town Bearsville, and for good reason. Without the bears that succored Hallie Brady, the earliest settlers would not have survived their first winter. Thirty-six years later, in 1786, they changed the name to Blackwell, but every year they hold a Hallie Brady Day to celebrate the woman who, with help, saved her neighbors from starvation in the winter...

Hoffman's darker side of love

Alice Hoffman aficionados are well acquainted with the novelist's obsession with the magical, mystical moods of Mother Nature—the blackbird with a broken heart, the river with a secret, the ice storm without remorse. The Third Angel, her latest work—following Blackbird House, The River King and The Ice Queen, to name a few—places Hoffman at perhaps the pinnacle of her...

Forces of nature

The Ice Queen is the latest in a long line of 30 years' worth of novels from Alice Hoffman—novels that seamlessly blend magic and reality. It is the tale of a librarian in a small town whose wishes come true, but not always for the best.

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

Local Girls (4 hours), a new collection of closely connected short stories by Alice Hoffman, is another example of audio adding a special dimension. The stories, set in a small suburban town, follow Gretel, a young teenager at the start, and her dissolving family over more than a decade. It's like looking at intimate family snapshots that skip through the years, isolated moments that capture...

Lonely souls finding their way

Alice Hoffman’s latest novel has the word “extraordinary” in the title for good reason: The best-selling author of The Dovekeepers has served up another historical novel that will dazzle readers until the last page.

Hoffman tells an ancient story

Herbs and potions, love charms and secrets, the complex intimacies between mothers and daughters: It’s clear from the outset of The Dovekeepers that we are firmly in Alice Hoffman territory. But instead of the safe suburbs of New England, we have been transported back to the first century at Masada, the mountain fortress south of Jerusalem where 900 Jews held out against the Romans before...

Posted by Eliza on March 11, 2011

We loved Alice Hoffman's latest book, a collection of linked stories called The Red Garden. And our reviewer, Maude McDaniel, hit the nail on the head when she articulated what makes Hoffman's writing great:Somehow, without elaborate wordplay, she manages to communicate a yearning interpretation of the life we all live, opening the reader’s eyes to the otherworldly riddles that make things...

Going back to Africa

Amplifying a little-known slice of Southern history, journalist Alan Huffman has reconstructed the riveting true story of freed slaves who fled Mississippi to establish a new home in Africa in the 1840s. Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today tells this stranger-than-fiction story in compelling style, capturing the hope,...